The WasteLand

byT. S. Eliot

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September26, 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot spent hisyouth in St. Louis and New England. Eliot

earned his A.B. and an M.A. degrees in philoso-phy at Harvard University in 1906. He spent thenext few years abroad (London, Paris, and Mar-burg, Germany) before settling in London in1914. Since his early days at Harvard, Eliot hadbeen writing poetry, but it was not until he metEzra Pound in September 1914, that his workreceived any special attention. Pound was so im-pressed with Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," that he sent it to Harriet Mon-roe, renowned editor of Poetry, proclaiming it"the best poem I have yet had or seen from anAmerican" (Pound in Ackroyd, p. 44). "Prufrock"was published in June 1915, and that samemonth, Eliot married Englishwoman Vivien (alsospelled Vivienne) Haigh-Wood. In 1917, Eliotbegan work as a clerk for Lloyd's Bank in theColonial and Foreign Department. Meanwhile,he continued to write poetry and, that same year,took a position as assistant editor at The Egoist,a prominent literary magazine. In 1922 in theEnglish journal Criterion, Eliot published TheWaste Land, a work that would revolutionizemodern poetry with its radical use of free verse,multiple perspectives, and literary allusion. Eliotadopted British citizenship in 1927 and becamea devoted member of the Anglican Church. Hissubsequent literary and critical works would re-flect a growing political and religious conser-vatism. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literaturein 1948, married his second wife, Valerie

THE UTERA8Y WORKA teog poem consisting of five sectiom set inpost-World War I London, though parts werewritten as early as 1014; first published fn1922,

SYNOPSISA complicated montage of voices conveys asense of the decadenee, confusion, anddespair prevalent m p$$t~W0rld War I Westernculture*

Fletcher, in 1957, and died in 1965. The WasteLand remains one of the most dramatic expres-sions of the atmosphere pervading Britain afterthe First World War.

Events in History at theTime of the Poem

World War I. T. S. Eliot left Marburg, Germany,in early August 1914 just as World War I began.Since Harvard had awarded him a travel grant,he went to England and taught there at OxfordUniversity. As a citizen of the United States,which would not enter the war until April 1917,the poet had a unique perspective on the toll itwas taking on England and her people. Food hadalready become scarce when he arrived in Lon-don, and it was impossible to overlook the news-

B R I T I S H / I R I S H L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S

529

The WasteI Land

paper headlines announcing the tremendousnumbers of British causalities.

Historians still debate the initial causes of thewar, but there is little room for argument aboutits effects. The British government, led by LloydGeorge, had done its best to inspire patriotismand high spirits among the country's young men.Thousands volunteered for service, dedicatingthemselves to fight for the honor and glory ofEngland. A century had passed since Englandhad fought in a major war. Everyone imaginedthat this contest would "be an affair of greatmarches and great battles, quickly decided"(Fussell, p. 21). The enthusiasm and the expec-tation of a quick outcome were soon dashed,however, by the technological nightmares of thewar itself: chemical weapons, machine guns,trench warfare. These "innovations" resulted inthe slaughter of hundreds of thousands of youngmen as well as the destruction of farms, churches,cities, and, it seemed, much of Western civiliza-tion. During the Battle of Somme, for example,in July 1916, of the 110,000 men who attackedthe German front, 60,000 were killed or injured(Fussell, p. 13). A year later, the third Battle ofYpres (July 1917), turned into a siege of severalmonths that resulted in 370,000 British casual-ties. Soldiers were dead, wounded, sick, orfrozen, and thousands of them literally drownedin the mud of the battlefield (Fussell, p. 16).

Though he did his best to enlist when theUnited States entered the war in 1917, Eliot him-self never saw combat. Poor health prevented hispassing the requisite physical exam. He tried toobtain a position in Naval Intelligence, but bythe time the paperwork was completed, the warhad run its course. Despite his lack of firsthandexperience, the war had a tremendous impact onthe poet. It would have been impossible to be inLondon during wartime and not notice the mul-titudes of refugees or the absence of young Eng-lish men on the city streets. In addition to hear-ing the horror stories of those returning from thefront, Eliot lost a very close personal friend, thetalented young French poet Jean Verdenal, whodrowned at Gallipoli in 1915.

Aftermath of the Great War. The Waste Landdoes not deal with life in London during the war,but with the aftermath of the war. Trying to fig-ure out how to resume one's life after four yearsof horror preoccupied Londoners once the peacehad been signed. A sense of waste and desola-tion filled the air. Many of the men who managed to survive the war suffered from severeneuroses associated with shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder. To many veterans, theurban landscape itself appeared transformed: nolonger did it seem a place of promise and ex-citement, but rather it took on a gloomy, omi-nous, even unreal aspect, as though it had lostits health.

Most significant is the shift in attitudes re-garding technology. In the decades leading up tothe war, people celebrated the idea of progressand the newfound conveniences of technology.But after the war a more sober appreciation ofthe destructive potential of technology emerged.The machine gun was a vivid example of thedeadly power that technology had loosed on theworld. Even a more benign device such as thetypewriter lost any innocence it might once havepossessed. Instead of making people's lives eas-ier, it seemed to have dehumanized them andtransformed individual "life" into mechanicalroutine.

Vivien Eliot, nee Haigh-Wood. On June 26,1915, T. S. Eliot married Vivien (also spelledVivienne) Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman whomhe had known for only a few months. Most crit-ics agree that this unfamiliarity was the source ofmuch unhappiness over the course of the cou-ple's life together, Vivien was unlike any of thewomen Eliot had ever known. She struck him as"adventurous and vivacious," traits to which theyoung intellectual was understandably attracted

W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S V O L U M E 4530

(Ackroyd, p. 63). For her part, Vivien saw theyoung Eliot as "a good-looking foreigner whocould rescue her from the world of Edwardianrespectability" (Ackroyd, p. 63). Her family be-longed to the upper middle class, and she verylikely felt stifled by a world of strict class divi-sions and social hierarchy.

Unknown to her fiance, Vivien had suffered"nervous disorders"—migraines, mood swings,and insomnia—for quite some time; in fact, shehad a history of illness dating back to childhood.He would learn this soon enough, for shortly af-ter the wedding, Vivien suffered a nervous col-lapse. Actually, Eliot himself often succumbed tofits of nerves, and caring for his wife aggravatedthis tendency. No doubt the combination of theirrespective nervous conditions made the relation-ship unusually trying for both parties.

It is important to note that the Eliots' rela-tionship went beyond a patient-nurse dynamic.Vivien not only had unrealized literary aspira-tions of her own, she also read and commentedon her husband's work. A revealing example ofVivien's commentary appears in the manuscriptof The Waste Land. The middle interlude of thesecond section of the poem, "A Game of Chess,"which begins with, "My nerves are bad tonight. . ."is generally understood as an autobio-graphical description of the Eliots' marriage andone of Vivien's breakdowns; in the margin,Vivien has written, "WONDERFUL!" (Eliot, TheWaste Land, lines 111-116).

Ezra Pound. An American poet and critic born inHailey, Idaho, in 1885, Ezra Pound was one ofthe most influential men of letters in the earlytwentieth century. Pound moved to Europe in1908 because he felt frustrated with the provin-cialism of American culture. He settled in Londonand for a time worked closely with Irish poet W.B. Yeats (see "September 1913," also in WLAIT4: British and Irish Literature and Its Time). LaterEliot became involved in the British avant-garde,taking special interest in Imagism and Vorticism,literary movements that attempted to convey con-crete images instead of abstract impressions.

In some ways, Pound is responsible for T. S.Eliot's success. When the two men met in 1914,Pound was the more established of the pair. Infact, Pound professed to "have more or less dis-covered [Eliot]" (Pound to John Quinn in TheWaste Land, p. 1). Indeed Pound, who had beenacquainted with London's literary and artistic cir-cles since 1908, did take the young Eliot underhis wing. Not only did Pound introduce the Lon-don newcomer to other writers, but he also went

to great lengths to get Eliot's work published. Be-sides sending Eliot's poetry to Harriet Monroe atthe important journal Poetry, Pound encouragedEliot to submit his work to the journals Blast, TheEgoist, and The Dial.

The two often critiqued each other's poetry,suggesting revisions, and in the end, Poundplayed an instrumental role in Eliot's revision ofThe Waste Land. As evinced in the publishedmanuscripts, he made several drastic editorialchanges in the poem. Pound seemed to have abetter sense of the overall structure of the poem,and so made editorial suggestions aimed at tight-ening the work. In retrospect, some critics be-lieve that Pound gave the work a streamlined,polished shape and highlighted themes that Eliothad difficulty expressing, while others believe hemisunderstood Eliot's message completely. Eliothimself considered Pound's advice invaluableand in recognition of such efforts, he dedicatedThe Waste Land to Pound, "i! miglior fabbro" aquote taken from Alighieri Dante's poem Purga-torio, which means "the better craftsman"(Southam, p. 136).

Lloyd's Bank. Eliot had hoped to make his liv-ing as a man of letters lecturing and writing re-views. Unfortunately, as of 1917, this plan hadnot yet worked out, and he was forced to resignhis teaching position and gain regular employ-ment to make ends meet. Eliot took a job in theLloyd's bank Colonial and Foreign Accounts de-partment as a temporary employee, then workedhis way into a permanent position. For Eliot, theposition was ideal. He found the work interest-ing, it gave him an opportunity to write in theevenings, and it proved less draining than histeaching position had been. Soon, however, thebank position would become stressful too. By1920, Eliot had been promoted to the informa-tion department of the head office, where heworked on the prewar debts between Lloyd's andGermany. Although he apparently welcomed theassignment, he began to resent the time it tookaway from his literary ambitions. Ezra Poundtried to raise enough money for Eliot to subsi-dize his income so that he could quit his job atthe bank. Living expenses, however, combinedwith Vivien's poor health, kept Eliot therethrough the initial publication of The Waste Landuntil the mid-twenties.

The Poem in Focus

Contents overview. Divided into five sections,The Waste Land has no single narrative thread. It

The WasteLand

B R I T I S H / I R I S H L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S 531

The WasteLand

has perhaps been most aptly described as "a webof subcutaneous nerve cells whose synapses fireperiodically as we proceed through the poem"(Sigg, p. 195). There is no linear plot develop-ment or even a consistent timeframe: the poemjumps around in both time and space across cen-turies and continents. There is, though, a com-mon focus. The poem features a variety of voicesthat all speak to life in the urban world of post-war London.

In addition to the five verse sections of thepoem, The Waste Land, also has its own footnotes.The notes were not published with the poem inits initial serial form but appended to it by Eliotfor the book publication. Some controversy hasbeen stimulated by the notes. Readers have ei-ther viewed them as a key to solving the mysteryof the poem, or they have scorned the notes as,in Eliot's own words, "bogus scholarship" meantto lead scholars on a "wild goose chase" (Eliot inLitz, p. 10). On one hand, the notes may pro-vide a sense of Eliot's own intellectual trajectoryduring the poem's composition; on the otherhand, they do not offer any overall interpretationof its meaning. A unified, self-sufficient work, thepoem stands entirely on its own terms.

Contents summary. "In the Cage." The WasteLand's epigraph comes from Petronius's Satyri-con. In the Satyricon, Trimalchio, a rich, drunkenmillionaire, tries to surpass the outlandish talestold by his guests at a lavish banquet. The talehe tells is of the Cumaen Sibyl, a woman withprophetic powers who asked the Greek godApollo for as many years as there were grains inher fistful of sand. Unfortunately, she forgot toask for eternal youth to accompany immortality.Apollo granted her request, and as she aged, herbody deteriorated until she was nothing but abottle of dust. For his epigraph, Eliot chose thefollowing quote: "Yes, and I myself with my owneyes even saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage; andwhen the boys cried at her: 'Sibyl, Sibyl, what doyou want?' 'I would that I were dead,' she saidin answer" (translation from Southam, p. 133).Setting the tone of the poem that follows, thequestion (cited in the original Latin and Greek)conveys a sense of eternal despair and futility.The quote's context, Trimalchio's drunken feast,may also suggest the widespread decadence andapathy of Eliot's own age.

"The Burial of the Dead." The title of this sec-tion is the title of the official burial service of theAnglican church. Its famous first lines contain amultitude of references from Geoffrey Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales (in WLAIT 3: British and Irish

Literature and Its Times) to Walt Whitman's "WhenLilac's Last in the Dooryard Bloomed." Readersmight feel an immediate sense of disorientationbecause April and spring, the time in which thesection is set, are generally thought to be periodsof regeneration and festivity, rather than of funeralservices. Introduced in this section are a variety ofimages that all carry a sense of bleakness and steril-ity, in which a strange melancholy and nostalgiclyricism are mingled. The section includes refer-ences to a number of infertile gardens and "stonyplaces," and uses several different voices and sce-narios to depict modern life as a type of hell onearth: "Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of awinter dawn" where "death had undone so many"(Waste Land, lines 60-61, 63).

Aside from the initial medley of images at-tached to the seasons, the poem's opening servesto invoke or awaken a multitude of speakers.Many of these speakers are anonymous and it isoften difficult to tell where one voice ends andanother begins. After the opening, we meetMarie, whose persona is based on a Lithuaniancountess; she reminisces about sledding in themountains as a young girl, feeling frightened yetfree. The next episode features an unidentifiedvoice whose dark prophesies, mixing biblicalwith modern idioms, seem to be a direct addressto the reader: "Son of man, / You cannot say, orguess, for you know only / a heap of broken im-ages" (Waste Land, lines 20-22). We then hearfrom the Hyacinth Girl, who has a rendezvousin the Hyacinth Garden that results not in inti-macy but incomprehension; looking into the"heart of light" afterwards, one sees only thesea—alien (its description is given in German),empty, and silent (Waste Land, line 41). Rathethan the source of life, it is presented as cold andbarren—a reflection of the city. After this,Madam Sosostris, another prophet, gives an enig-matic tarot reading. Finally, readers are forced toexperience the numbness of the London commuters, traveling to and from work in a wintryhaze that starts to resemble the circles of hellfound in Dante's Inferno.

All of these episodes suggest that the world ofthe poem is in decline. Each of the voices issearching for a way to escape its present envi-ronment, whether through memory, travel, sexthe occult, or the comfort of routine. The prob-lem is that nothing seems to work. Readers notonly witness this failure, but they also becomeimplicated in its truth.

"A Game of Chess." The title of this sectioncomes from a play by Thomas Middleton (1580-

W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S V O L U M E 4532

The WasteLand\

1627). In the scene to which the poem refers, agame of chess serves as a metaphor for seduc-tion, in which the movement of chess pieces cor-responds to the maneuvers of the man andwoman. The larger structure of the poem's "A

Game of Chess" can be broken into three mainparts: lines 77-110, 111-138 and 139-172. Allthree segments involve "romantic" scenarios, butthey differ according to the socioeconomic sta-tus of the characters.

B R I T I S H / I R I S H L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S 533

The WasteI Land

The first subsection is characterized by ele-vated description and heightened rhetoric. Itopens with an allusion to Shakespeare's Cleopa-tra on her "burnished throne" (Waste Land, line77; see Antony and Cleopatra in WLAIT3: Britishand Irish Literature and Its Times). The woman de-scribed here lives like a queen in luxury, sur-rounded by tapestries, paintings, and perfumes.Amidst the elegance and opulence of the scene,the poem not only uses inflated language but itis also overtly sexual and artificial. The sceneseems ripe for romance and seduction, until werealize that at least one of the pictures hangingon the wall is a rape scene from the classical mythof Philomel, who was turned into a nightingaleafter revealing the sordid details of being rapedby her brother-in-law. This image of Philomeland the other "withered stumps of time" deco-rating the room seem to usher us out and downthe stairs, as its female inhabitant sits brushingher hair. Though rich and sumptuous, the sceneis sterile; there is no promise of passion here(Waste Land, line 104).

The second subsection of the poem leaves thisworld of luxury and affluence and shifts to a mid-dle-class husband and wife. Readers witness avery strange exchange as both parties seem to besuffering from anxiety and nervous strain. Thewoman displays many of the same tendencies asEliot's own wife, while the man might be expe-riencing shell shock. He is haunted by memoriesof the war and life in the trenches, and he mighteven be experiencing hallucinations and flash-backs. As in the first scene of the section, thereis no romance or seduction here, despite the des-perate attempts at conversation. Instead there isa failure to talk to, or at least understand eachother. Both parties seem unstable and unable tosee past their own anxieties to connect with theother.

Finally, in the third subsection, we are privyto a gossipy conversation taking place in a lower-class pub. Punctuated by the barman's calls of"HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME," the accouconcerns Lil, friend of the subsection's anony-mous speaker. Lil's husband gave her money tohave her teeth pulled, and Lil has just spent itfor another purpose—an abortion. (The deliveryof her last child almost killed her.) Presently Lilis not feeling well, having taken the pills thedruggist gave her to bring off the abortion. Notonly is the speaker completely unsympatheticwith Lil; she actually sides with the husbantelling Lil she should be ashamed to look so "an-tique" at 31: "Think of poor Albert / he's been in

the army four years, he wants a good time / andif you don't give it him, there's others will" (WasteLand, lines 164, 148-149). The verse paints a de-grading picture of lower-class married life. Suchmarriage, according to the poem, is all about sexand reproduction. There is no possibility of un-derstanding or love; it is merely another sort ofwilderness.

No matter which class one belongs to, "AGame of Chess" is just that, a game. Romanceand friendship have mostly been reduced to un-feeling manipulation and strategic maneuvers,while lovers have become mere players, if notpawns. Ultimately, this section of the poem chal-lenges modern assumptions about emotional in-timacy and suggests that, if such intimacy is notalready extinct, there may no longer be a placefor it in contemporary urban society.

"The Fire Sermon." The title of this section ofthe poem originates in Buddhism. The Fire Ser-mon "was preached by Buddha to warn mankindagainst the fires of lust, anger, envy and the otherpassions that consume men" (Southam, p. 164).Accordingly, the poem presents several such sce-narios. Echoes of Andrew Marvell's "To His CoyMistress" run through this episode, foreground-ing the idea of seduction and casting a darkshadow of urgency over the entire section. First,we visit the banks of the Thames River, appar-ently the recent scene of some festive summerevenings, but the magic of those evenings hasdissipated and all that remains are garbage anddisease. The focus zooms in on a rat crawlingalong the riverbank, recalling perhaps life, orrather death, in the wartime trenches, where ratsfed on corpses strewn across the battlefield. (Themiddle-class husband, in the previous section,describes his home as a "rats' alley"—Waste Land,line 115). The riverbank sparks the memory ofa shipwreck, as well as an Australian ballad fromWorld War I about a brothel-keeper named Mrs.Porter, who was infamous for spreading venerealdisease. From the low humor of the lines "O themoon shone bright on Mrs. Porter / And on herdaughter / They wash their feet in soda water,"the poem shifts to a rather mordant nightingale's,echoing the rape of Philomel from "A Game ofChess" (Waste Land, lines 119-201). Then wefind ourselves back on the streets of London,only now it is later in the day and the commuterswe met in "Burial of the Dead" are on their wayhome from work. The juxtaposition of such im-ages of disease and defeat with images of do-mestic and commercial life, the tones—rangingfrom the lyrical to the bathetic—suggests some-

W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S V O L U M E 4534

thing of the complexity of modern urban exis-tence, conceived as simultaneously cheerful andsordid.

This section introduces Tiresias, whom Eliotconceived as "the most important personage inthe poem, uniting all the rest" (Waste Land, p.148). In "The Fire Sermon," Tiresias witnessesone of the poem's central events, an encounterbetween "the young man carbuncular" (carbun-cles are large puss-filled acne) and the typist(Waste Land, line 231). In this brief portrayal, atonce sober and acid, what begins as dinnerevolves into a sexual encounter that seems mech-anized and unemotional. The typist is bored,while the vain young man, apparently interestedonly in the sex, welcomes her indifference. Tire-sias indicates that the scene is all too common,at least among the working class, and the poemincorporates an Elizabethan sonnet, which servesto further satirize the sentimentality of conven-tional love in a modern, urban setting. Any fur-ther thoughts on the event are cut off by thegramophone, which silences the typist's thoughtsand takes the reader out of her flat and down tothe Strand, where music can be heard from apart-ments, restaurants, and churches along the way.

The rest of the episode consists of additionalvoices from various times in history, each tellinga tale of "love." First, the poem takes us onboardQueen Elizabeth's sixteenth-century barge,where the Queen flirts with the Earl of Leicesternot because of any romantic interest, but as apart of a political power play. From the riverbarge, the poem travels to twentieth-centuryMoorgate, London's financial district, and thento Margate Sands, the resort where Eliot spenttime in 1921 recovering from nerves and assem-bling the first three sections of The Waste Land.The section nears its close in ancient Carthage,recalling Vergil's Aeneid and the suicide of QueenDido, who threw herself on a funeral pyre whenher lover Aeneas left her to found Rome. Con-cluding the section are fragments of the Confes-sions of Saint Augustine, a self-examining treatisethat discloses his uneasy youth and spiritual jour-ney before finding refuge in the Roman CatholicChurch.

"Death by Water." By far the shortest sectionof the poem, "Death by Water" originated as amuch longer piece, but Pound excised the bulkof it. The title refers back to Madam Sosostris andher tarot reading: "Fear death by water" (WasteLand, line 55). In this short section, a Phoeniciansailor's body drifts underwater as an anonymousspeaker laments the tragedy of his early death.

Phlebas the Phoenician may represent Eliot'syoung friend Jean Verdenal, who drowned in thewar, in which case this part of the poem couldbe elegizing Verdenal's premature death. Variousimplications can be discerned in the lines. Theyperhaps suggest the inevitability of death, or theprocess of material economic exchange, or theimportance of self-knowledge. Certainly theocean imagery connects to the other images offluidity in the poem. The section might also re-fer to the Christian ceremony of baptism, whichpurifies souls for admission to the church. Theceremony's use of water, depending on the spe-

The WasteLandl

TIRESIAS

In his footnotes, Eliot claims that Tiresias serves, not as thepoem's main character or central figure, but as its unifying

persona* "What Tiresias $ee$, in fact, is the substance of thepoem. , * * just as the one-eyed merchant, seder of currants,mete into the Phoenician sailor, and the Jatier Is not whollydistinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women (inthe poem! are one woman/ and the two sexes meet m Tire-sias" (Waste la#4 p, 148K Tiresias, according to Greekmythology, had lived m both a man and a woman* Becauseof these experiences, he was calfed to settle an argument be-tween Zeus and Hera, the king and qyeen of the gods, Theyasked him whether a man or a woman experienced greaterpleasure during physical intimacy, Tiresias supported Zeus'sclaim that the woman enjoyed it more, and as a result, Herastruck him blind. In Eliofs version of the myth, Tiresias is notonly blind, but also shares male and female physical attributes:he is an "old man with wrinkled female breasts* { Wmte lam/,line 21 9).

cific practices of individual denominations,ranged from sprinkling a few drops on one's fore-head to complete corporeal immersion.

"What the Thunder Said." Of "What theThunder Said," Eliot observed that it was "notonly the best part of the poem, but the only partthat justifies the whole, at all" (Eliot in Southam,p. 185). Apparently Ezra Pound agreed withEliot's assessment, because he made virtually nochanges or suggestions to this final section of thepoem. There are at least three layers of meaninginterwoven into the section, all concerned withthe question of salvation.

B R I T I S H / I R I S H L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S 535

The Waste\Land

The title provides a key to the three layers:Christianity, the Grail Legend, and Eastern phi-losophy. In relation to Christianity, "What theThunder Said" might contain a reference to Rev-elations and John's prophecy of the apocalypse,which was given to him as a scroll to eat. Thisscroll contained the mysteries of God. Themes ofChristian damnation and salvation run through"What the Thunder Said." There are possible al-lusions to the plagues and droughts that God setupon the Egyptians and promised to deliver inRevelations. There are several references toChrist's last hours, from his last night spent inprayer in the garden of Gethsemane, to his be-trayal by Simon with the cock's crow at dawn.There is "frosty silence in the gardens," and wehear the rooster cry "Co co rico co co rico" (WasteLand, lines 323, 392). The poem might also fore-

DADAISM

scholar have ix^tulated thai the *DA* of *What $iemight also contain a contemporaiy referenc

t0 an ami-aesthetic art movement called Dadalsm* whichthrived from 191 6*1 922* The Dadaisis, many of wham waredbse friends with Ezra Pound, celebrated the absurd and Irra-tional* By iti use of the term, Tfm W&s£e L&nd may be sug-gesting that we a$ readers need to look i eyond logical $oiu>ti0m to what resists systematic arrangement Perhapsredemption can only come out of the complete breakdown andtransformation of the waste land as we know it

cast Christ's subsequent arrest by the Roman sol-diers and the crucifixion: "the agony in stonyplaces / The shouting and the crying" and "Hewho was living is now dead" (Waste Land, lines324-25, 328). In lines 359-365, we walk withthe disciples along the road to Emmaus (a vil-lage some distance from Jerusalem) on the dayof Christ's resurrection. They are accompaniedby a person whom they do not recognize, and inthe poem an unidentified voice asks "Who is thethird who is always beside you? / When I count,there are only you and I together / But when Ilook ahead up the white road / There is alwaysanother one walking beside you / Glidingwrapped in a brown mantle" (Waste Land, lines359-363). The Gospel of Luke later reveals thisunknown figure to be Christ after his resurrec-tion. In addition to the Christian interpretation,

the third figure anecdote, says the poem's notes,recalls a memoir of an Antarctic expedition bythe famous explorer Ernest Shackleton, in whichthe exhausted explorers hallucinate and imaginean additional traveler with them.

A second layer of meaning emerges from thesection's references to Jesse Weston's study of SirGalahad's quest for the Holy Grail. In this sectionof Eliot's poem, Sir Galahad approaches theChapel Perilous, where the knight must face a fi-nal test of his courage before attaining the grail.We know that Galahad must bear witness togrotesque things, like "bats with baby faces, in theviolet light"—an image belonging as much to theambiance of European expressionism in the yearsbefore the Great War as to the world of medievalGothic; we do not, however, know if Galahadpasses his test and actually acquires the Grail(Waste Land, line 379). Late in the poem a roosterappears, recalling the disciple Peter's final betrayalof Christ; it may also be signaling the departureof the ghosts and terrible spirits from the Chapel,something that would signify Galahad's success.But the poem is ambiguous to the end and re-fuses to offer conclusive evidence of a new day.

The last layer of "What the Thunder Said" isrooted in "The Three Great Disciplines" of theUpanishads, treatises in the Sanskrit language onHindu theology. Three groups of creatures ap-proach their creator, Prajapti: gods, men, anddemons. Each of them asks him for advice. Toall, he answers, "DA." The gods interpret this as"control," as in "control yourselves." The men in-terpret it as "give," as in "give alms." Finally, thedemons interpret it as "sympathize." After eachinterpretation, the poem offers a cryptic responseabout what each of these might mean. For ex-ample, after the command is interpreted as"Give," the poem asks "What have we given?"and posits: "The awful daring of a moment's sur-render / Which an age of prudence can never re-tract" (Waste Land, lines 401, 402-403). The im-portant point about the incorporation of theSanskrit word is that it suggests that perhapsChristianity is not the solution to the problemsof the Waste Land, nor is placing all faith in SirGalahad's Holy Grail quest.

As the poem ends, its text accelerates andspins out of control. The phrases of the verse getshorter, and the languages change even more fre-quently until the world it has created explodes.We are left with "shantih shantih shantih," a phrasethat translates approximately to "the peace whichpasseth understanding." Perhaps the Waste Landwe have experienced has been annihilated. If the

W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S V O L U M E 4536

S

poem has succeeded, it might be because, by itslast line, we have escaped from this waste landand reached a completely new and unfamiliarplace that we cannot yet understand because wedo not recognize it.

Psychoanalysis. "My nerves are bad tonight,"says a speaker in the second section of The WasteLand, bringing to the forefront the individual'spsychological condition (Waste Land, line 111).In 1922, the New York Evening World proclaimedpsychoanalysis "our most popular science"(North, p. 65). This trend was not limited to theUnited States. By the early 1920s, psychoanaly-sis, especially as represented by Sigmund Freud,had become extremely popular in Great Britainalso. Suddenly pamphlets addressing anxiety,nervousness and how to cope with one's re-pressed instincts appeared, and consumers couldpurchase "products which promised to 'controlStage-Fright and other forms of nervousness' inaddition to preventing colds and headaches"(North, p. 66).

In England, the acute problem of shell shockhad amplified the urgency of psychological ques-tions. A psychological condition that affectedmany survivors of the First World War, shellshock is more commonly known today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Sufferers typically ex-perienced an event that aroused intense horrorand/or could have resulted in their death. Sol-diers who witnessed the deaths of fellow com-batants, as well as nurses and doctors who triedto help the wounded and dying, often sufferedfrom the trauma of these experiences. Symptomsmight include intense flashbacks to the event, re-curring dreams, or severe reactions to cues thatresemble or remind the sufferers of their originaltrauma.

Initially, psychoanalysts thought that shellshock was linked to hysteria (a common femalemalady thought to result from over-stimulation).The prescribed treatment often involved someversion of the Rest Cure, which required isola-tion, bed rest and no stimulation from the ex-ternal world. In other words, patients should notthink or talk about their experiences, nor shouldthey attempt to read or otherwise distract them-selves. Instead, they should simply relax.

This treatment was not only prescribed tothose soldiers who suffered from shell shock. Itwas a much more general cure for a multitudeof psychological ailments. T. S. Eliot and his wife,for example, suffered from nervous disorders,and both sought refuge in sanitariums at variousstages of their union. It should be noted, how-

ever, that sanitariums do not have the same con-notations of disease and mental illness that theymay carry today. Indeed, Margate Sands, whereEliot spent three weeks in October of 1921 re-covering from excessive stress, was a fashionableseaside resort. In any case, psychological disor-ders and anxieties were not regarded as criminalor deviant. The public accepted them as illnessesthat were both explainable and scientificallytreatable.

In England, the Bloomsbury set, a group ofprominent artists and thinkers including LyttonStrachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and VirginiaWoolf, began to introduce Freud and psychoan-alytic ideas to the general public. Lytton Stra-chey's brother, James Strachey, published Eng-lish translations of Freud, and the project wassubsequently adopted by Woolfs Hogarth Press.Not only did the writers of Bloomsbury publishthese editions of Freud, but they also wrote pam-phlets about the possible applications of psy-choanalytic methods to understanding art.

When Freudian concepts such as repressionand the unconscious became part of mainstreamculture, the general public tended increasingly tofocus on them. Psychoanalysis began to affect, ifnot produce, the behavior it sought to explain;it became obligatory to develop complexes(North, p. 67). People began to accept both theidea that they harbored a deep, impenetrableemotional region with themselves, and the ideathat their behavior might not always stem fromrational causes. They started to look for psycho-logical explanations of patterns of behavior, andto acknowledge that the unconscious might in-fluence individuals in peculiarly oblique ways.

The proliferation of these ideas had a signifi-cant impact on many fields of endeavor, such aspolitics, advertising, and literature. For example,the notion that advertising might do more thansimply notify consumers of the availability of aproduct had not occurred to anyone before(North, p. 77). Now the popular enthusiasm forpsychology encouraged advertisers to considerways of manipulating the customer's desires.

The complicated relationship of "modern" lit-erature to psychology was likewise becomingwidely recognized. Works like The Waste Land,James Joyce's Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf s Mrs.Dalloway (also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Lit-erature and Its Times) were all regarded as psy-chological studies. This affiliation of literaryworks to psychology helps explain the extremecritical reactions that such works inspired. Read-ers might find the perceived exploration of an in-

The WasteLand\

B R I T I S H / I R I S H L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S 537

The WasteI Land

dividual's psychology offensive (especially in thecase of a character like Joyce's Leopold Bloom,who thinks about "base" matters such as mas-turbation and digestion) or they might find suchan exploration fascinating. Probably the associa-tion helped The Waste Land get published, sinceit could be regarded as "a most distressingly mov-ing account of Eliot's own agonized state of mindduring the years which preceded his nervousbreakdown" (Bush in North, p. 81). Marketingthe poem as an extreme case study, given thepopularity of all things psychological, mightmake it more appealing to readers.

Sources. Eliot's poetry assumes knowledge of awide range of literary and cultural sources. TheWaste Land draws upon classical mythology;English, French, and Italian poetry; Shake-

Ht DO THE POLICE IN OIFFIRINT VOICES

Originally, Eflot planned to call the poem, "He Do the Po-lice in Different Voices/ a quotation from Our Mutmt

Friend, by Charles dickens, Jn this novel, *$foopy is a found Hngadopted by old Betty Higden, a poor widow, 'I do love a news-paper/ she says, 'Yoy mightn't think it, but Sloopy is a beau-tiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in differentvoices'" (The Waste la#4 p* 1 25)* The titte would have pointeup the dramatic nature of the poem and the different voicesreaders encounter along their journey through its landscape,

spearean drama; German opera; contemporaryLondon landmarks; popular ballads; scientificand other learned treatises; biblical literature;and even Eastern philosophy. When the poemfirst appeared, its frequent deployment of allu-sions and quotations aroused widespread con-troversy. Many critics faulted the work for whatthey perceived as a lack of originality and evenwent so far as to accuse Eliot of plagiarism. How-ever, other readers have suggested that Eliot's useof these sources represents an attempt to revital-ize the great works of the past and reconstructliterary traditions.

Two main sources have often been used as"keys" to unlocking The Waste Land: Jesse We-ston's From Ritual to Romance (1920) and SirJames Frazer's The Golden Bough (12 vols. 1890-1915). In the notes to the poem, Eliot impliesthat the secret to understanding The Waste Landlies in Ritual to Romance. In this work, Weston

investigates the occult myth of the Fisher King,an impotent king whose land is cursed to endureinfertility until a stranger arrives to take up spe-cific challenges. Eliot and Weston connect thismyth to Christ and the Holy Grail (Southam, p.128). In the Christian myth, the Grail is the cupused by Christ and his disciples at the Last Sup-per and later to catch the blood from his side atthe crucifixion. The Grail gets lost, and a knight(in Arthurian legend, Sir Galahad) must find itin order to bring healing and restoration to thedying kingdom. The knight's quest takes him tothe Chapel Perilous, where, like the stranger inthe Fisher King myth, he must answer certainquestions about the Grail to lift mankind's curse.

Eliot studied James Frazer's The Golden Boughwhile at Harvard and claimed to draw uponFrazer's elaborate study of primitive myth andritual, especially the vegetation ceremonies thatwere meant to appease the "powers of nature andensure the continuing cycle of the seasons, withthe life of the new year to be born out of the old"(Southam, p. 129). Other important sources forThe Waste Land include (but are not limited to)Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio, The Confessions ofSt. Augustine, the Bible, The Tempest, the Upan-ishads, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai.

Eliot's practice of allusion has encouragedreaders to search for a key to the poem some-where outside its borders. Instead of grapplingwith the poem itself, they expect to find what itmeans in sources like The Golden Bough. But evena careful consideration of The Waste Lands notesand sources does not provide a recipe for inter-pretation. The sources may help explain some ofEliot's own thought processes, or bring refer-ences into sharper relief, or promote an under-standing of the poem's many echoes and voices.Ultimately, however, the disorientation experi-enced when reading The Waste Land cannot beremedied by an outside source, for this shock ef-fect comprises the heart of the poem.

Literary context. The form of The Waste Land isunlike that of any work Eliot's contemporarieshad ever encountered. It attempts, many criticsagree, to mirror the so-called modern condition.According to this view, experience is broken,fragmented, alien and alienating. The world isout of joint and hopelessly equivocal. Thus, thepoem consists of a montage of voices, echoes,and quotations. Inherent in this polyphonicform, in Eliot's ventriloquism, may be the sug-gestion that everything one can experience is nec-essarily secondhand. There is no truly originalthought or expression—only the great store-

W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S V O L U M E 4538

house of cultural forms waiting to be revived likediscarded fashions. The decay of the life of lan-guage is reflected in the routinized and disem-bodied existence of human beings in the mod-ern metropolis. In the face of such a drying upof the immediate sources of life, the poet can onlywonder: "What shall [we] do now? What shall[we] do?" (Waste Land, line 130).

On the other hand, the poem can be viewedas attempting to inject new life into a culturallydead world. Though fragmentary, the quotationsand echoes may be the only available lifeline outof the waste land of the modern world. Perhapsby harking back to the best thoughts and ideasof the past, the poem will somehow be able torejuvenate a sense of literary tradition or culture.In any case, the consensus is that, in his render-ing of the shattering incongruities of modern civ-ilization, Eliot's poetic design and linguistic mod-ulation are both groundbreaking and powerfullyexpressive. Unlike many other poets of the earlytwentieth century, Eliot did not write directly inconventional poetic forms. He incorporatedthem, usually ironically, when it suited his pur-pose, but he believed that poetry must change it-self drastically in order to represent life in themodern world. In his view, conventional formswere not adequate to the modern condition be-cause they implied a vision of order that was ar-tificial and contrived.

Reception. Few poems have provoked suchstrong reactions from their readers as The WasteLand. Critics' original responses fell into twosharply opposed camps. While readers eitherloved the work or hated it, everyone recognizedthe impact that it would have on poetry and lit-erature. The poem was undeniably innovative.Written in free verse, it made heavy use of liter-ary allusions, refused linear or logical interpreta-tions, and relied more on emotional impact thanon any rational argument.

The opinions of the poem's detractors maybest be represented by Louis Untermeyer, whoshared his disdain in the Freeman, dismissing theverse as "a pompous parade of erudition, alengthy extension of earlier disillusion, a kalei-doscopic movement in which the bright piecesfail to atone for the absence of an integrated de-sign" (Untermeyer in Grant, p. 151). He alsocomplained that "Mr. Eliot does not disdain tosink to doggerel that would be refused admis-sion to the cheapest of daily columns" (Unter-meyer in Grant, p. 152). Untermeyer faults thepoet for writing about "low" subject matter, top-ics that are inappropriate for the newspaper, let

alone literature. The poem, said this and otherreviews, had nothing real to say to the world. In-stead it was merely a showcase of Eliot's own per-sonal erudition. The references to Dante andShakespeare were plain arrogance and episodeslike the one featuring the "young man carbun-cular" were included for their shock value alone.

In the Double Dealer, another more sympa-thetic reviewer charged that, though the poem

The WasteLand\

mmm m AMERICAN?

his formative years in the United States, and he attendedHarvard University* Only afterwards did he spend a significantamount of time abroad and move to England, ft was not yntil1 927 that Eliot joined the Anglican church and adopted Britishcitizenship — five years after The Wmte Land was published*Why then, is it considered one of the landmark texts of twen-tieth-century British literature? Yes, The Waste Lmd featuresLondon landmarks and recalls many of the hallmarks ofBritain's titerary traditions, but it does not Identify with theseplaces or conventions, In fact, the seme of profound alienationthe poem conveys depends on a lack of identification- Stillmany critics favor a retroactive inclusion of his works in theBritish canon, ft can be argued that Ef iof s religious conversionand adopled citizenship Justify his inclusion. But a better ex*planation might be found in the sheer impact of The Wast®lafldon the mass of British literature to follow. No matter howfefiot saw himself, British or American, one cannot deny the

monumental influence The Waste land has had on subsequentgenerations of British writers. Certain poets, such as W. H, Au~den, would follow El iof s te4d and write verse whose form re-flected the condition of the modern world as they understoodit. Others, like Philfp Larkin, would rail against such "gibber-ish/' which he thought was esteemed only for its outrageous*ness, and revert to traditional poetic forms that could morefaithfully represent the human condition (tarkin, p. 23K

might make perfect sense to Mr. Eliot, to the av-erage reader who "cannot read through Mr.Eliot's spectacles, it must remain a hodge-podgeof grandeur and jargon" (]M. in Grant, p. 170).While The Waste Land may well be a masterpiece,asserts this review, most readers will likely notfind the poem satisfactory. Yes, it does contain"passages of extreme beauty," but only the poet

B R I T I S H / I R I S H L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S

539

s. Elior was born and raised in St.Louis, Missouri, He spentT.

The Waste\Land

can appreciate all of its intellectual and emotionalassociations because their significance is of suchan individual nature (JM. in Grant, p. 171).

Finally, there were critics who thought thepoem a work of genius. Their reviews attempt tojustify the disorientation that most readers expe-rienced. Conrad Aiken, for example, claimed thatthe poem "has an emotional value far clearer andricher than its arbitrary and rather unworkablelogical value" (Aiken in Grant, p. 160). Aikenpraised the overall emotional impact, concludinghis review with the proclamation that "the poemsucceeds . . . by virtue of its incoherence . . .[and] its ambiguities" (Aiken in Grant, p. 161).What would otherwise be flaws become virtuesbecause they are honest representations of mod-ern experience.

—Erin Templeton

For More Information

Ackroyd, Peter. I. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon& Schuster, 1984.

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Tran-script of the Original Drafts Including the Annota-tions of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957.Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot's Early Years. New York: Ox-

ford University Press, 1977.Grant, Michael, ed. T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage.

2 vols. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.Larkin, Philip. All What Jazz. London: Faber, 1970.Litz, A. Walton. Eliot and His Time. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1973.North, Michael. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene

of the Modern. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999.

Sigg, Eric. The American T. S. Eliot: A Study of theEarly Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1989.

Southam, B. C. A Guide to The Selected Poems of T. S.Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,1994.

W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E A N D I T S T I M E S V O L U M E 4540